Black and grey tattoo of a gnarled tree with twisting roots on an upper arm, shown in a sepia-toned close-up photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gnarled tree with roots on an arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A gnarled tree with a full, layered canopy rises from twisting, exposed roots that run down the limb. The linework is dark and detailed, with hatching and stippled shading that gives the bark and foliage depth. The image is sepia-toned and softly focused at the edges, so the tattoo is the sharp focal point against the blurred skin.

Botanical Upper arm Tree Root Branches Foliage Bark

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The navvies called it the Old Man, though nobody at Sallowby Cutting could say who had planted it. By the third week of March the gang had dug around its trunk to the depth of a man's chest, and still the roots kept coming, pale and thick as hawsers, sliding under the clay as if they had somewhere better to be.

Keep reading

Foreman Tobias Reeve wanted it gone by Friday. He took the bar to the nearest root himself, and the crack went off in the wet air like a shot. The branches overhead shivered, though there was no wind. Men who had worked the Lincolnshire lines swore they felt the ground lean. Tobias laughed and swung again, and by dusk his left hand would not close around a cup.

Nobody cut the tree down. The company engineer came out in April with his drawings, found the rails heaved where the roots had pushed up under the sleepers, and wrote to London asking that the line be bent round the oak. I copied the reply out for my sister, who keeps a ledger of such things. It said the tree had stood there longer than the parish, and that it was not the company's to move.

The line still curves there. Engine drivers ease off for the bend without being told, and on still mornings you can see the roots lying in the cutting like the veins on a wrist, carrying something up into the canopy that nobody in Sallowby has ever managed to name.